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The success of the efforts for green building depends largely on integrating such approaches with building design education. However, most of the existing studies on green building have focused on the technical issues, while its socio-cultural and educational aspects have been less examined. In order to alleviate the problem, this paper presents an international workshop that explores how green building design can be taught in a global teamwork project using a green building assessment system, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) checklist as a framework and examples of vernacular architecture as precedents. The results of an empirical survey reveals a gap between students' general learning about green building in a developing and a developed country and suggests that a collaborative project experience may facilitate bridging the gap and exchanging technical and cultural information related to sustainability.

Effective collaboration and knowledge management are the major contributors of success in the construction industry. Although a huge amount of interdisciplinary knowledge is exchanged in building design processes, there is a lack of tools for representing information flows. Therefore, this paper focuses on the collaboration between architects and structural engineers and introduces an innovative matrix-based tool named “The Layered Dependency Structure Matrix” for modeling and managing the discipline-specific and collaborative design activities. The proposed method is compared with the conventional techniques used in the industry and its application is demonstrated in a beam design example.

After more than four decades of its beginnings, Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD) has already reached a level of maturity in both the education and the profession. There is an ever-growing amount of literature on the subject; however, relatively few studies have taken a systematic approach to analyze CAAD education. Moreover, design institutions often view CAAD merely as a technical issue ignoring socio-cultural and theoretical aspects. In order to alleviate these problems, this paper presents a structured analysis of CAAD education based on Prof. Necdet Teymur's theory of architectural education. Prof. Teymur claims that the components of architectural education should be studied in terms of objectives (why), contents (what), methodology (how) and management (who) along with four different knowledge and disciplinary levels (viewpoints); namely, sociological, ideological, epistemological, and pedagogical. In this paper, current issues of CAAD education are addressed within this framework and several proposals are presented.

This paper aims to compare designers’ cognitive behaviors in geometry-based modeling environments (GMEs) and parametric design environments (PDEs).

This study used Rhinoceros as the geometric and Grasshopper as the parametric design tool in an experimental setting. Designers’ cognitive behaviors were investigated by using the retrospective protocol analysis method with a content-oriented approach.

The results indicated that the participants performed more cognitive actions per minute in the PDE because of the extra algorithmic space that such environments include. On the other hand, the students viewed their designs more and focused more on product–user relation in the geometric modeling environment. While the students followed a top-down process and produced less number of topologically different design alternatives with the parametric design tool, they had more goal setting activities and higher number of alternative designs in the geometric modeling environment.

This study indicates that cognitive behaviors of designers in GMEs and PDEs differ significantly and these differences entail further attention from researchers and educators.

This paper re-visits the basic premises of open building: designing for change as well as for stability, including the users in the design decision-making processes, and disentangling the building systems into the levels and allowing replacement; then, addresses the limitations of conventional design media in terms of the capabilities to support these aims. It is discussed that the design media should be predictive, dynamic, and interactive. Virtual prototyping as an enabling technology is reviewed and proposals are made for the future use of this technology for open building design.